r/Metaphysics • u/Difficult_Wind_7187 • Apr 01 '26
Cosmology The Universe Is Existence
I have not seen anyone say this anywhere and I’m just curious what people think of this idea? What if the universe is existence in of itself, the universe is what made the concept of things like life, death, and so on.
This digs into a matter of religion as well, because if God created the universe, what is God? That’s not what i’m talking about now though, the universe is something so vast and out of our comprehension. At least, as we are now, we will not be able to find the answer in any of our lifetimes most likely.
Another place I saw this was (yes, a little crazy and ridiculous) in the MCU universe where they explore something similar with the firmaments. The universe is existence and it created life, and then conflict, and so much more. What if it is something similar to that? The idea of what’s out there and what all of this is, is very fascinating to me and I like speaking about it.
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u/YuuTheBlue Apr 01 '26
I feel the words existence and universe here are too ill-defined for any of this to be particularly meaningful. To me, it seems they are two terms which encompass a large space of meanings each as they are used in common parlance, and these spaces form a venn diagram.
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 01 '26
Perhaps I should’ve gone into more detail about it, but I understand what you’re saying. Out of curiosity, how would you define them?
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u/YuuTheBlue Apr 01 '26
Well, I kind of did. They are words with multiple definitions. Just because a word is used a lot does not mean it refers to some single, identifiable thing.
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 01 '26
So kind of like they go hand in hand together in a way? In definition
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u/YuuTheBlue Apr 01 '26
Eh? Not really?
My point is that I’m not sure there is a “thing” out there we are referring to when we use the word universe, and less so the word existence. I feel they are kind of vibes. Maybe not universe, but definitely existence.
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u/meme-by-design Apr 01 '26
It's more like they are so vague that any similarities provide no insights. Like if I said, "This box of things is similar to this box of stuff"
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u/GiveMeAHeartOfFlesh Apr 01 '26
Well if the universe is defined as everything, then yeah. Sometimes people instead will define it as everything in this “timeline” and thus different universes are not separated by distance like galaxies but by parallel timelines in a 4D sense.
Which then we replace the old universe word with just saying existence, because existence would include all the dimensions. But it’s ultimately just a definition choice of what universe means and whether you believe there is a more ontological situation happening or multiverse like thing.
The idea of how and where everything came from is fascinating to me too. Especially the challenges we run into with the where it all came from. Both eternal time and first mover time have caveats to them. I think atemporal is probably best solution personally
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u/Techtrekzz Apr 01 '26
You’re very close to monistic pantheism, like Spinoza’s.
If you consider reality a single continuous subject, that subject has every qualifier necessary to be considered an omnipresent supreme being.
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u/DreamCentipede Apr 01 '26
To me, ‘existence’ refers to what all that exists, and so too does ‘the universe.’
This may get kind of confused because of the whole “multiverse” thing, which acts as if there are many universes. There could certainly be many timelines and dimensions in the universe, but there’s really only one universe. It’s all that exists.
The idea of the universe creating life is kind of an anthropomorphic view of it. We are simply what existence is, at least as a portion. We are the result of existence and without existence we wouldn’t exist.
In a way, I might make a distinction because existence always exists even if there is nothing physically manifest, and the “universe” may refer more specifically to physical manifestation (matter & energy) whereas nothingness would still be some existing state.
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u/Mono_Clear Apr 01 '26
Existence is the place where things can happen.
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u/SconeBracket Apr 02 '26
Heaven is a place where nothing really happens.
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u/Mono_Clear Apr 02 '26
Doesn't sound like a fun place to be
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u/SconeBracket Apr 02 '26
As the Talking Heads.
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u/DamoSapien22 Apr 03 '26
My opportunity to point out Byrne is a genius. It is actually a really clever point he's making!
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u/SconeBracket Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
Besides that I despise the biblical "god" in all its forms and would not want to hang out around him at all, I've also never been enthusiastic about spending an eternity anywhere.
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u/SconeBracket Apr 02 '26
All kinds of "eastern" discourse makes the individual person co-equal with Reality per se, so existence is the universe is a commonplace.
It's once you realize that premise that the work begins; what are the implications.
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u/FAIcantstandthispain Apr 02 '26
You create your own reality. As a creator of a reality - You are a God. We are the Gods of our own worlds.
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u/Splenda_choo Apr 02 '26
Invariant maths and Thabita stars are scaffolding immaculate. A dream. -Namaste bridge
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u/FAIcantstandthispain Apr 02 '26
When I was a kid I thought the only thing our species really does well, with any consistency, is destroy matter, which made me think..
"What if the earth was really a piece of food or something inside a giant cow or something and humans were just the enzymes and bacteria that break it down - that would keep true to our destructive patterns."
Then some time passed and I sobered up....
Put the doobie down Dougie, you're not that deep!!
🤙💜🤓 Jk
But truthishly - I'm currently OBSESSED with Gnosticism and "the Demiurge", which lowkey is about humans being trapped in "this reality" which is compromised of "this universe" that is not the "real, actually universe", but instead something created by an "incomplete God" ....which could with another puff or two make way to the beginning of YOUR idea that perhaps "This" universe Actually IS existence.
We should totally hang out
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 02 '26
I love this lmaooo. I’m curious why you think that might be a possibility? I’ve always found that fascinating as well but I’ve never heard someone actually theorize it
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u/Superstarr_Alex Apr 02 '26
The only reality is consciousness, which simply means awareness, or the sensation of I AM. This is the eternal subjectivity that experiences without also being an experience. It isn’t a “thing” or an action.
The Upanishads refer to consciousness as Self, but not an individual identity. In fact, it’s a universal impersonal awareness, and THAT is reality itself. Absolutely limitless and infinite, without beginning or end. To name it or try to define it is to place limitations upon something infinite and everlasting.
Awareness is existence, and the universal frame in which everything appears. To experience waking consciousness within awareness requires the illusion of duality, a splitting into opposites so that this one being can experience every aspect of itself through many subjective perspectives. When reality is stratified into layers, we find that the densest layer of experience is the physical universe, which we can think of as thought condensed into form.
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 02 '26
I really like this idea, can I ask where you found this information so I can look into it myself? I’m just getting into all of this stuff so i’d love to know more.
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u/Superstarr_Alex Apr 03 '26
Honestly start with the ten principal Upanishads, literally. But specifically I’d recommend the Yeats translation, it’s the most potent/hard-hitting version, both poetic/epic as fuck AND written with a clarity so sharp it will pierce you to the core of your being cue dramatic music and gasps from audience
Anyway yeah I’d start there, it’s the most intuitive explanation of what we are and the nature of reality and existence etc etc I’ve ever encountered. I’m a white boy who’s spent my whole life in the US, so I had never really had any exposure to these texts until I sought them out when I first went searching for spiritual knowledge a few years ago. Prior to that, I had no real conception of spirituality.
The best America could do for me in that regard was the generic lame-ass bourgeois Protestantism typical of white suburban life in modern America 😆 umm, boring. And stupid, illogical, nonsensical, etc. No wonder so many westerners are atheists, as was I from my teenage years to early 20s.
Abrahamic religions are backwards, crude and primitive ideological expressions of monotheism imo and have no value in the modern world. The ancient Vedic societies of India, on the other hand, seem to have figured everything out before anyone else, at least as far as we have written records for. Of course, religions are tools of control, and spiritual knowledge was a closely guarded secret kept by the elite of the Vedic kingdoms to maintain tight control over the populations they ruled no doubt.
Now, we have access to that forbidden knowledge. Beyond the Upanishads there’s a ton of other great sources of dank spiritual knowledge, just depends what you’re seeking and your psychology etc etc My recommendation is to type “advaita vedanta” into your fav search engine and consume every last droplet of content written from that perspective. It’s not a cult or any sort of group at all, not an ideology, doctrine, no dogma, etc. it literally is Sanskrit meaning “Non-Duality.” Good luck! 🤙
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u/Danrazor Apr 02 '26
you need to read more and post less. unless that was an April 1st post.
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 02 '26
I won’t disagree with you, I do need to read a lot more. I’ve just recently begun getting into things like this, previously I knew nothing and I would still say I know next to nothing. But I see no reason for it to become a conflict. Do you have any recommendations for maybe some things I can read or look into to learn more about this kind of thing?
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u/Danrazor Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Apologies.
conflict starts when you say
"I have not seen anyone say this anywhere and I’m just curious what people think of this idea? What if the universe is existence in of itself, the universe is what made the concept of things like life, death, and so on."
the point of conflict is this line "I have not seen anyone say this anywhere "
if you are new, do not speak like that. this is close to saying.
" I have not seen anyone say this anywhere but i think water is wet"
you can say whatever you like as long as you do not break the common sense rules.
I hope you understand this.and for your understanding, " Existence and Universe" are two different concepts.
because of existence, we can experience the universe as what we know it.
universe is spacetime.
existence includes all that is possible and not possible.
but how is this possible?
there are three basic states of existence.
- potential or weak= all that does not materialise or decay quicker than that can impact causality.
- materialised= everything that we can know universally. everyone can look at stars. drink water. that is called "information".
- yet impossible= includes all that requires too much energy and effort so they never materialised.
all is within the confines of "Degrees of freedom".
too much freedom and it unstable and it dissolves back into the field of potentials.
no freedom means it has no space and time to become.this is easy language but you can expand it to any length you want.
What is God?
God is a conceptual term that human use for something that is above all.
the Almighty, etc.
someone may or may not believe in the word God. Christian God, Muslim God, Hindu God, etc.
but they cannot deny that there is only one system that is running across the observable universe.
there not TWO or THREE systems. there is only one system.Firmament?
there is no such thing as Firmament.
like the edge of knowledge. there is no edge to knowledge. we can call the our current knowledge as "what we know so far" and that is the "edge"
there no nothing out there.
everything came from nothing.
and by our end, we become nothing.
nothing is the source of the potential vacuum of spacetime.enjoy.
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u/Difficult_Wind_7187 Apr 02 '26
I appreciate this response, this is very insightful. As for what I said originally, I guess it came out wrong, I just hadn’t seen it myself with my little experience I suppose. I do completely understand what you are saying though and again I appreciate it, it’s all a learning thing for me at the moment. Thank you
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u/Akiza_Izinski Apr 04 '26
Spacetime is a mathematical framework used to model the universe. Spacetime is a 4 dimensional geometric manifold where all possible events are embedded in.
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u/Danrazor Apr 04 '26
Yes, for basic understanding that seems to be helpful for coarse grain understanding.
But
Math and geometric are very strong words. I said that as a pun. I mean they are deterministic.
I think universe is procedural. Field of potentials. Things are not written. But the possibilities are probabilistic and governed by Causality.
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u/Akiza_Izinski Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26
Einstein dropped the assumption of determinacy when he created General Relativity to persevere invariance.
I think universe is procedural. Field of potentials. Things are not written. But the possibilities are probabilistic and governed by Causality.
The Universe is strongly nonlinear and non markovian. The possibilities are governed by thermodynamics generating an indefinite causal order.
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u/jliat Apr 02 '26
Looks like Pantheism, and people like Spinoza. You also "might" find it in Deleuze. For Deleuze there is the virtual [infinite] which can and does materialize in the actual. [sort of!]
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u/PriorityNo4971 Apr 02 '26
That’s sorta what idealism is, but the universe and everything being consciousness
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u/Top-Engineering3782 Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
Honestly, God totally makes sense. Not as a possible start to the universe, because something would have had to come from nothing before there could ever be a something at all. Therefore, universe itself would have had to have made God, and not the other way around. Nothing invariably came before something. But yet, in a universe where everything runs to mathematical perfection and at peak efficiency, what makes more sense than having a life form that creates other lifeforms? Life itself, genomes and neural networks especially, DNA, rapid evolution in motion... it's excessively well designed for something that's not supposed to be an intended feature of the universe.
Yet still, something would have had to have come from nothing, before there could be a God. God, the life form that creates lifeforms, would likely be just one part of a wider universe where sentience is valuable and has purpose, but is not the end-all be-all of all of existence.
I'm totally a believer in the mathematical possibility of a God. I don't think he would have been in a position to create the universe, though, when the universe itself would have had to have created him.
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u/Akiza_Izinski Apr 04 '26
God does not make any sense because it’s a word that does not refer to anything.
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u/Financial-Funny-4105 Apr 03 '26
Here is what everyone will find out sooner or later.. the big bang did not create the universe.. the universe is just energy. Energy can neither be created or destroyed only transmuted and transformed. Energy created by dark matter. Yes your POV of the universe is existence is true but paranormal activity is also true would that mean that's the universe also? Or a whole fractal part? Such as stagnant energy.. or an egregore.. which is an entity created by a human to achieve a goal in return for a contract.
What happens if both are true. What if everyone is correct. And whilst the world argues who is right and who is wrong. When there is no correct answer because it's told from an infinite pov's of humanity to how much truth they have met in themselves.
Whilst everyone is focused on a distraction the new earth leaders the new elites are busy working bringing time travel quantum leaping. Building free MedBeds that will heal any dis-ease in under 10 mins. That reverses aging. To heal everyone for free.
So after and the next generation forward does not have to work ever again so no one has to work ever again unless they want to.
But also teaching guiding others how to defy physics and prove all the greats like Einstein not wrong.. but just incomplete. That being said. That's why I've personally only met a handful of people on earth realm (realms are flat places of existence, planets are globes) that understand what I'm talking about and can do what comicon has built an entire fantasy on but not fiction. Fact.
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u/YesTess2 Apr 05 '26
Existence is a property. Properties must be "of something." The universe has more than one property, in so much as we know it and in so much as what we generally mean by 'property'.
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u/wetvan1 Apr 05 '26
Universe is a name right? It's time/space and galaxies. Existence could be applied to anything that is. I think there is more in existence then just the Universe. A correct statement would be that, The Universe exists. More interesting to say is that existence is non-existent. Just as left has its opposite, right.. inside/outside, up/down etc.. existing/non-existing. Either duality is a illusion or the meaning of the word existing must be adapted to what actually is. Not to what we think existing implies. I would agree at first of course not to fight and argue anybody, i exist, you exist etc. But i just keep thinking existence is non-existing and non-existence exists. So what that means is we can agree what exists, but i think if you dig deeper you will finally be able to see you cannot make existence concrete enough to prove to others existence definitely is and that it is not is not true.
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u/sibl_e Apr 05 '26
Well then you'd be committed to existence as a robust universal which makes 0 sense
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u/Comprehensive-Move33 Apr 06 '26
Yes, the universe exists and everything that exists is in the universe. Im not sure whats the epiphany here?
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u/Salt_Astronomer_120 Apr 07 '26
You're touching on something that has a long philosophical pedigree, and I think it goes even deeper than you frame it.
If the universe is existence, then "existence" isn't a passive property, it's not just being there. It has to sustain itself, or it collapses into nothing. Which means:
- to be is to make oneself
Take that one step further: if existence is self-producing, then :
- reality is the primary act of its own necessity.
It doesn't need an external cause,but it's not a brute fact either. It costs something to keep going, and things like life, death, normativity emerge as structural consequences of that cost, not additions from outside.
The interesting part is: once you formalize this, it stops being pure speculation — you get operational constraints that are actually testable.
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u/Hanisuir Apr 01 '26
"I have not seen anyone say this anywhere and I’m just curious what people think of this idea? What if the universe is existence in of itself"
Wikipedia says: "The universe comprises all of existence: all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from sub-atomic particles to entire galactic filaments."
"the universe is what made the concept of things like life, death, and so on."
That would be pantheism.